Claim: 'the pause' is caused by small volcanic eruptions

From the AGU: WASHINGTON, DC— Small volcanic eruptions might eject more of an atmosphere-cooling gas into Earth’s upper atmosphere than previously thought, potentially contributing to the recent slowdown in global warming, according to a new study.

Scientists have long known that volcanoes can cool the atmosphere, mainly by means of sulfur dioxide gas that eruptions expel. Droplets of sulfuric acid that form when the gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere can remain for many months, reflecting sunlight away from Earth and lowering temperatures. However, previous research had suggested that relatively minor eruptions—those in the lower half of a scale used to rate volcano “explosivity”—do not contribute much to this cooling phenomenon.

Now, new ground-, air- and satellite measurements show that small volcanic eruptions that occurred between 2000 and 2013 have deflected almost double the amount of solar radiation previously estimated. By knocking incoming solar energy back out into space, sulfuric acid particles from these recent eruptions could be responsible for decreasing global temperatures by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.09 to 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit) since 2000, according to the new study accepted to Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

These new data could help to explain why increases in global temperatures have slowed over the past 15 years, a period dubbed the ‘global warming hiatus,’ according to the study’s authors.

The warmest year on record is 1998. After that, the steep climb in global temperatures observed over the 20th century appeared to level off. Scientists previously suggested that weak solar activity or heat uptake by the oceans could be responsible for this lull in temperature increases, but only recently have they thought minor volcanic eruptions might be a factor.

Climate projections typically don’t include the effect of volcanic eruptions, as these events are nearly impossible to predict, according to Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., who was not involved in the study. Only large eruptions on the scale of the cataclysmic 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which ejected an estimated 20 million metric tons (44 billion pounds) of sulfur, were thought to impact global climate. But according to David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and lead author of the new study, classic climate models weren’t adding up.

“The prediction of global temperature from the [latest] models indicated continuing strong warming post-2000, when in reality the rate of warming has slowed,” said Ridley. That meant to him that a piece of the puzzle was missing, and he found it at the intersection of two atmospheric layers, the stratosphere and the troposphere– the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where all weather takes place. Those layers meet between 10 and 15 kilometers (six to nine miles) above the Earth.

Traditionally, scientists have used satellites to measure sulfuric acid droplets and other fine, suspended particles, or aerosols, that erupting volcanoes spew into the stratosphere. But ordinary water-vapor clouds in the troposphere can foil data collection below 15 km, Ridley said. “The satellite data does a great job of monitoring the particles above 15 km, which is fine in the tropics. However, towards the poles we are missing more and more of the particles residing in the lower stratosphere that can reach down to 10 km.”

To get around this, the new study combined observations from ground-, air- and space-based instruments to better observe aerosols in the lower portion of the stratosphere.

Four lidar systems measured laser light bouncing off aerosols to estimate the particles’ stratospheric concentrations, while a balloon-borne particle counter and satellite datasets provided cross-checks on the lidar measurements. A global network of ground-based sun-photometers, called AERONET, also detected aerosols by measuring the intensity of sunlight reaching the instruments. Together, these observing systems provided a more complete picture of the total amount of aerosols in the stratosphere, according to the study authors.

Including these new observations in a simple climate model, the researchers found that volcanic eruptions reduced the incoming solar power by -0.19 ± 0.09 watts of sunlight per square meter of the Earth’s surface during the ‘global warming hiatus’, enough to lower global surface temperatures by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius (0.09 to 0.22 degrees Fahrenheit). By contrast, other studies have shown that the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption warded off about three to five watts per square meter at its peak, but tapered off to background levels in the years following the eruption. The shading from Pinatubo corresponded to a global temperature drop of 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit).

Robock said the new research provides evidence that there may be more aerosols in the atmosphere than previously thought. “This is part of the story about what has been driving climate change for the past 15 years,” he said. “It’s the best analysis we’ve had of the effects of a lot of small volcanic eruptions on climate.”

Ridley said he hopes the new data will make their way into climate models and help explain some of the inconsistencies that climate scientists have noted between the models and what is being observed.

Robock cautioned, however, that the ground-based AERONET instruments that the researchers used were developed to measure aerosols in the troposphere, not the stratosphere. To build the best climate models, he said, a more robust monitoring system for stratospheric aerosols will need to be developed.

Abstract

Understanding the cooling effect of recent volcanoes is of particular interest in the context of the post-2000 slowing of the rate of global warming. Satellite observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) above 15 km have demonstrated that small-magnitude volcanic eruptions substantially perturb incoming solar radiation. Here we use lidar, AERONET and balloon-borne observations to provide evidence that currently available satellite databases neglect substantial amounts of volcanic aerosol between the tropopause and 15 km at mid to high latitudes, and therefore underestimate total radiative forcing resulting from the recent eruptions. Incorporating these estimates into a simple climate model, we determine the global volcanic aerosol forcing since 2000 to be −0.19 ± 0.09 Wm−2. This translates into an estimated global cooling of 0.05 to 0.12 °C. We conclude that recent volcanic events are responsible for more post-2000 cooling than is implied by satellite databases that neglect volcanic aerosol effects below 15 km.

Oh boy! Let’s add this to the list. The fact that there are over 55 excuses now just shows you they don’t really ‘understand’ or want to understand the main cause of the recent rise in global temperatures post late 70s. NOTE: They don’t blame co2 for the 1910 to 1940 warming.
“New excuse for the “pause” of global warming #58:”
Wednesday, 5 November, 2014http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/11/new-excuse-for-pause-of-global-warming.html

No, this counter-intuitive volcano argument has already been tried. Excuse no. 8 IIRC 😉
I already commented on this today in Willis’ thread.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/18/get-laki-get-unlaki/#comment-1792895
The haitus is caused by the LACK of volcanoes because it was the volcanoes that caused the late 20th warming in the first place.
Stratospheric cooling :http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/uah_tls_365d.png
Surface warming:http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/giss_loti_tls.png
The sulphuric acid reacts not just “oxygen” O2 but ozone : O3. Ozone blocks UV , so less UV is one cause of warming. Sorry UN, none of this has to do with CFCs the Montreal protocol as can be seem from first plot. CFCs have not been bouncing up and down in time with major volacanic eruptions.
There’s more than just the ozone, but if they want to talk about ozone it’s in the stratosphere where it counts, not at 15km.
At least they working with real data but the claimed excuse for the pause is just more maybe, could-be pseudo-science.

Ok. ‘Hiding in the deep oceans’ has been debunked by recent research. They continue to insist that THE SUN has no or minimal impact on climate. And Chinese aerosols are out…? So, once again, a NATURAL cause makes its’ presence felt (IF, IF, mind you).
I believe it to be a combination of influences- solar, volcanoes, (what else?)- and apparently, NOT MAN.
Again.

Volcanoes tend to be big and when they erupt people for miles around know about it and report it.
The earth tremors they produce can be picked up by seismographs located around the world.
On average, between 50-70 volcanoes erupt each year and at any given time there are about 20 erupting.
If we have more volcanic activity then I would expect to see:
1. Papers by vulcanologists discussing the increased activity.
2. Papers by seismologists discussing the increasing seismic activity caused by the increased volcanic activity.
3. Documentarys telling us we are all going to die due to increased volcanic activity.
4. Somebody to name the 71 or more volcanoes that erupted each year that we have had increased activity.
5. Climatologist’s blaming it on CO2*

Yes but vulcanologists are not climate ‘scientists ‘ so despite being experts in their area , they have no value in this area because the ‘models ‘ have said its true and the lack of reality to support it means nothing .

Heads I win tails you lose , while I thought we had be told time and again the ‘wonderful’ models already allowed for volcanic eruptions and that is why they ‘knew’ they played no part in warming .
Climate ‘science’ has more excuses for its failure than TV evangelist explaining why once again they caught with their pants down.

“small” eruptions “might” eject etc
Code for look for some minute phenomenon that has likely never been examined regarding its quantitative effect on the global climate but which obviously makes a contribution visisble to the naked eye, the more visible the better, then speculate that it “might be” the explanation for why the whole AGW thing seems to be falling apart.
Pro’s:- Plausible case for further funding and puts doubt on the “Deniers” case plus good copy to supportive media
Cons:_ Well, yeah – so its a con but it’ll all be forgotten by the time we publish the results that show it was a complete red herring ( if we can even be bothered.

Be fair, guys,
This new study uses actual real measurements and finds that the effects of small volcanoes may have been underestimated in the climate models.
So far so good.
But is there any evidence that this effect was not also present between 1980 and 2000?

Their logic is flawed.
They are using AERONET to infer how much SO2 is between the tropopause and 15km. From this they infer volcanic activity.
So far so good.
AERONET only started in about 1998 so they have no figures before that so now they take a leap of faith and fail with their logic.
They infer that because there is a pause and because their levels of SO2 are more than they expected there must be more SO2 now than before they started measuring it with AERONET. Therefore there is more volcanic activity now.
In other words they use the fact that there is a pause to deduce that volcanic activity has increased. They do not use observations to deduce that volcanic activity has increased.

Kinda reminds me of the Ozone Hole. It was there when we first had the tools to see it, so it must be our fault, or some kind of flawed logic like that. Blame America first. Then the West. Then technology. Then humanity in general.

Now, new ground-, air- and satellite measurements show that small volcanic eruptions that occurred between 2000 and 2013 have deflected almost double the amount of solar radiation previously estimated.

That is 13 years. Now, how about applying this thinking to any 13 year period? What about the period from 1910 to 1923 when it warmed? These researchers might be the victims of current research, observations, assumptions and their models.

Discovery –Are volcanic eruptions on the rise?
Not according to Lee Siebert, director of the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program (GVP).
Charged with documenting, analyzing and disseminating information about Earth’s active volcanoes, the GVP boasts 40 years of data to indicate it’s business as usual under the crust…..
“If you plot data from the last 200 years, there’s a clear increase in the number of eruptions over time,” Siebert said, “but that’s not a function of the actual number of eruptions but rather due to reporting effects.”

you have hit the nail on the head. A study that starts in 2000 can’t differentiate between post-2000 and pre-2000, so it can’t provide the answer. The best it can do is to suggest something to be looked at further. But no, that’s not good enough for our brilliant post-modern scientists, they have to plunge straight into the usual circular logic: things changed in 2000, we’ve looked at the post-2000 period and found something, this something must have been different before 2000, this something is therefore what caused the change. I am getting tired of the tunnel vision and rank stupidity.

They were dormant, the extra heat in the atmosphere caused minute cracks in the surface allowing magma to flow into them, enlarging to the point where the volcano could form and erupt. None of these deadly volcanoes would have seen the light of day had it not been for climate change.

So they find that volcanoes emit more sulphates than thought. – OK, that’s measured.
But before they measured the volcanoes, did the volcanoes not emit the sulphates?
Are these quantum volcanoes that collapse into a sulphate emitting volcano on observation?
Or do we now have more volcanoes – after 1998 volcanoes have become more subtle and so no-one has noticed them going off, but they are there – natural selection at work – yet what are these volcanoes predators?
Or is this just a case of the models were wrong (GIGO) and we have to spin to make it worse than we thought?

The latest (2014) info is my information. The USGS paper was to help Obama.
There are more volcanoes under tha sea than on land. 53000miles of ocean ridge system and every mile with volcanogenic CO2 bubbling out mixing with sea water and being emitted when that water reaches the warmer surface. There are between 1m and 3m volcanoes on the planet ALL CO2 producers which makes my 60% look a bit slim. Our 3% is not only not important but ignorable. (especially since CO2 does not drive climate)

johnmarshall,
I keep reading sceptics making the claim that volcanoes emit more co2 than man. Maybe in the past, but not now. People should stop repeating this claim UNLESS you can show me the information. Always back such assertions with references. I would love to be shown to be wrong as it would allow me to point to volcanoes! If the facts change, I will change my mind.

Which produces more CO2, volcanic or human activity?
….. Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually. …..
Because while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value.http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html

Jimbo, I have to do a better job of copying things I see, but I read something in the last six months that said the number of volcanoes measured to get what we attribute to volcano emissions is under 10. The article said that 3,000 active volcanoes have not been measured. Do you know anything about this?

jimbo,
Can you assist me with this: “Robock said the new research provides evidence that there may be more aerosols in the atmosphere than previously thought. “This is part of the story about what has been driving climate change for the past 15 years,” he said. “It’s the best analysis we’ve had of the effects of a lot of small volcanic eruptions on climate.”
Is there reliable backtesting available over time? Asking because they seem to be relating this to a specific time window (the last 15 years) so would we not need to compare temps to SO2 over a longer time span relative to CO2?
Second. If we’re just discovering more SO2 (or aerosols) are there other sources for them in substantial enough quantities to measure? In other words, are these aerosols only natural (and only volcanic?) or partially anthropogenic.
Speak slowly please. I can’t do the chemistry.
Thanks,

So something they didn’t know about can be responsible for the Pause but they know everything about the time before the Pause so it must be CO2?
Either they know everything so it’s CO2, or they don’t, in which case may be it is, maybe it isn’t. The more they come up with stuff they didn’t know, the weaker their argument is – do they not see that?

I keep asking Anthony to do a diary on Bardarbunga just to get viewpoints. Recently there was an Icelandic website saying Bardarbunga was now possibly putting out 60,000 tons of SO2 per day.
Dr. Spencer on his monthly temperature charts always points out the Mt. Pinatubo cooling and the super-El Nino heating. Dr. Spencer sees a correlation between some volcanoes and cooling.
Today I see the Laki diary which claims no correlation between volcanoes and temperature.
I would like to see an educated (real volcanologist) attempt at explaining volcanoes/climate.

Lets see,
The sun has a better correlation to temp than CO2
The moon’s orbit has a better correlation to temp than CO2
Small Volcanoes has a better correlation to temp than CO2
PDO has a better correlation to temp than CO2
La Nina, El Nino has a better correlation to temp than CO2
AMO has a better correlation to temp than CO2
How many scientist have sold their souls for a piece of silver.

Actually, this is categorically untrue. CO2 has a truly excellent correlation to global temperatures from 1850 through the present. Not only excellent, but almost exactly what is predicted by only its direct action as a greenhouse gas. Over that time, HadCRUT4 can be amazingly well fit by:
where is the concentration of CO2 in parts per million and is the HadCRUT4 global temperature anomaly. This fit implies a total climate sensitivity per doubling of CO_2 of 1.82 K, quite reasonably close to the ~1 K predicted by line by line software using the actual spectrum of CO_2.
This fit is a two parameter fit! And one of those basically fits the zero of the absolutely arbitrary scale of the Hadley anomaly. The 2.62 is the only meaningful number present.
That doesn’t prove that CO_2 is solely responsible for the warming, because this curve does not extrapolate backwards into the arbitrary past. Things are more complex than this. What it means is that over the thermometric era, CO_2 is a possible explanation for some or all of the observed warming.
Incidentally, the PDO has absolutely terrible correlation to observed temperature. I can’t even use it to modulate the CO_2 based component and get a better fit than CO_2 alone. Nor do any of the other oscillations have a good correlation. They have a good correlation with this feature, or that feature, sometimes — like volcanoes. But they are not well correlated with anything I can see in the data to the point where I can even think about putting together a plausible model using them — so far. I’m currently looking at Mauna Loa top of troposphere insolation, or some function of “Volcanic Explosivity Index” (VEI) as discrete temperature changes linked to named eruption events with some trailing decay time, but I’m guessing that volcanic explosions have a highly variable chemistry and that they certainly have different latitudes and different cone heights and hence kick things into the atmospheric circulation differently, so I’m not very optimistic.
Besides, one can just look at HadCRUT4 and see that even VEI 5 events like Mt St. Helens or El Chichon (Pinatubo was a 6) have almost no attributable effect on the climate, and we could simply be mistaken in attributing the behavior of global temperature variation from 1992 to 1995 to Pinatubo — it is of the same order as the clearly visible natural variation of the climate over all of HadCRUT4, so how can we be certain in any quantitative attribution of it as a cause? Noise is known to be at least as large as its “signal”.

HadCRUT4 is garbage. It can’t be relied for any purpose except to show that CO2 obviously hasn’t had a measurable impact on global temperature, since models assuming that it does have failed so miserably to predict GASTA.
Nor should it come as a surprise that it and all other surface station temperature recreations are garbage when you know how they were compiled and computed.

That’s even more sceptical than me.
HadCRUT 4 is weak but its the best we’ve got.
Julie Andrews would like to sing in the Austrian Alps. But if she had to use a slag heap I’m sure she would.
So must we.
HadCRUT seems to be less politically corrupted than GISS. It’s main weaknesses are inherent to all blending of different weather stations and it’s calibration against GISS.
But it isn’t just a fantasy – like the computer models. (In my opinion).

It’s more insidious than a fantasy. It’s adjusted, interpolated, folded, bent, spindled & mutilated.
Granted that if anything GISS is even smellier garbage, but just. Is it better than BEST? Possibly.
If they’re all the best that “climate science” has to offer, then IMO better not to use any global reconstruction at all. Compare to best stations for regions, such as (admittedly adjusted, too) CET or the US or well maintained oceanic island stations, without trying to create a global average sure to be execrable at best and more likely worse than worthless, except, as I say and others have said, to demonstrate how miserably the CO2-based models fail.
IMO a truly valid GASTA, if such a creature be possible, should and would show at most the ECS found in the lab, although feedbacks are probably net negative, so no enhanced GHG effect would be at least as likely.

I get where you’re coming from but we are talking about GASTA here. What is GASTA for? It is just a measure of a net change to the planet… no cause or reality involved.
It’s like a Global weather forecast – were all sunny with a chance of showers (from drought to monsoon).
Or Global height above sea level.
Or Global freedom.
It’s politically determined to be important and actually meaningful absolutely nowhere.
HadCRUT seems to be the best Global measurement of change to the weather from all the surface measurements. In my judgement.
Does such a measure matter? Yes (politically).
Does such a measurement have physical reality? Meh (it won’t kill you).
So I’m not so sceptical as to throw out the whole effort.

I would throw out all efforts to date as hopelessly flawed, including intentionally so.
HadCRU has “lost” the Met Office “data” upon which they purportedly built their original pile of rotten garbage, made only stinkier with time.
A panel with no oxen to be Gored or sacred cows to protect needs to start over, assuming a global average is even theoretically possible. Its methodology needs to be complete transparent and repeatable.

It’s a good point you make. Losing the original data is a faux pas.
But Exeter does hold good records; the CET is as good as it gets.
Starting again is very appealing, it sounds like the BEST thing to do. But politics will still intervene.
I prefer to plough the slough and get muddy rather than returf the bog and pretend its not floating on the mire.
But I do concede that that may be too pessimistic.

That CET is good, though adjusted to show more warming in the past 50 years, I’ve already mentioned. There are other regional data sets that aren’t too bad or could be readily fixed.
Your pessimism may well be justified, but there will be a push for GISS garbage to be dumped and a new, clean attempt to be made, less tendentious than BEST. Probably won’t happen in the US until there is a President Paul or equivalent, however.

Very interesting… Now show me where in history CO2 has not lagged temperature. Cause and effect. The truth is that at no time in the record has Co2 lead, and temp followed. Show me in the record where I am wrong!

And yet the volcanic activity that cools Earth is responsible for warming Mars?
“The study, by scientists from Brown University and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, suggests that warmth and water flow on ancient Mars were probably episodic, related to brief periods of volcanic activity that spewed tons of greenhouse-inducing sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-11-warmth-early-mars-episodic.html“

It’s a completely different case. Sulphates on Mars are adding atmosphere where there was virtually none. And if the theory is correct, adding water vapour where there was none too.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison.

well the models, made various assumptions with respect to positive reinforcement in order to get such high temperature sensitivity. Most of these have been shown to be false and therefore we are left with the basic response to carbon dioxide, which is pretty much nothing on its own. So perhaps that the reason for the “pause”.

I do not quite understand how volcanoes behaved in the past. Did they remain stock-still until some 18 years ago they decided to blow their acids into the atmosphere to influence it and to fool mankind? How about the influence of volcanoes in these many billions of years B.C.?

You can look up plots of known volcanic activity over various spans. The best records realistically only go back a few years in a remotely trustworthy manner. We know about major eruptions earlier, but, they were major and easily observed. So, prior to satellite based observation there are numerous eruptions on dry land that were never recorded and at sea … no way to really know. Undersea eruptions would probably not affect the albedo much, though warm plumes of water could potentially affect the formation of low level clouds locally. If you read Willis Eschenbach’s analyses of volcanic events vs temperature data, there really is not much, if any, evidence for global effects.
Even major eruptions become problematic when you deal with records from the deeper past (say around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire). There are mentions in Chinese of historical texts of something big that happened, probably in Indonesia around 400 – 500 CE, but the Chinese were too far away to know what actually happened, and closer to the event either no records survived later historical events, like wars and fires and mildew, or no one literate survived to write a record. The best guess is that Krakatoa erupted on roughly the same scale as the known 19th C event, but that’s is just an educated guess at best.
When you come down to it, we know some about how the planet works, but really only just “some.” There is a huge reserve of historical documentation for rare events for which we have no direct empirical explanation, just guesses.

As far as I can tell from the abstract & press release, I can’t see any “control” case – ie the same data set prior to “the pause” showing substantially less aerosols to come to the conclusion they did. As far as I can tell, they assumed that was the case & used a “climate model” to get the answer. But of course it is all just to get funding : ” To build the best climate models, he said, a more robust monitoring system for stratospheric aerosols will need to be developed “.
This doesn’t appear to prove anything. It is either a shameless ploy for funding or they are doing really poor science.

The science is “settled”, but it seems every year there are dozens of stories like this about “underestimating” this or that feature of the climate. It implies they may need to rethink the basic theory, but they never do. Yet each time some minor little natural thing turns out to have a bigger affect on climate than they thought it only goes to show to skeptics how much more effect natural variation has than AGW proponents allow for.

If AGW is a serious problem and if vulcanologists concur with this new theory for the “hiatus,” then a solution has been identified. Hallelujah! Now all we need to do is get working on producing aerosol producing machines that pump pollution into the atmosphere. I hope environmentalists will welcome this planet saving pollution.

From a June 14 WUWT posting – Study: Climate engineering can’t erase climate changeOther climate engineering strategies are less appealing, such as fertilizing the ocean with iron to absorb carbon dioxide or reducing global warming by injecting particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight.

“Take the example of solar radiation management, which is the idea of putting aerosols into the stratosphere, kind of like what happens when a large volcano erupts,” Axsen explains.
“This is asurprisingly cheap way to reduce global temperatures, and we have the technology to do it. But our study asked other important questions. What are the environmental risks? Will global citizens accept this? What country would manage this? Is that fair? Suddenly, this strategy does not look so attractive.”
Mount Pinatubo Facts
• 15-20 million tons of sulfur dioxide were discharged in the atmosphere following the eruption which caused a global cooling among others.
• Mount Pinatubo’s eruption caused the ejection of 10 cubic kilometers of magma
The Pinatubo eruption delayed temperatures for about 3 years, so this would require 5 to 7 millions tons of SO2 per year and 3 KM^3 of dust per year. All injected up around 50,000 ft.
In what world besides an ‘Ivory Tower’ is this cheap and easy?

Maybe. This is certainly the oft-quoted assertion. But if so, why didn’t the double-whammy of Mt. St. Helens and El Chichon in 1980 and 1982, respectively, which very definitely affected the stratosphere (El Chichon dumped 7 million tons) have no discernible effect on global temperatures? See the graphics I included or linked in another reply, or Willis’ other thread on this general subject.
It is by no means clear that even large volcanic explosions like Mt. Pinatubo have an effect on the climate that is distinguishable from natural variation. Note well I’m not saying no effect, I’m saying that that effect is within the range of natural noise and is rapidly erased because the climate is almost completely insensitive to even 1 to 10% variations in the amount of sunlight being received at the top of the troposphere.
But we know that already! The top of atmosphere insolation varies by 7% maximum to minimum every year (by over 90 watts/meter^2) as the Earth undergoes its elliptical orbit. I’m assuming that the Mauna Loa apparent transmission is relative to this much larger baseline, although I’ll have to read the referenced papers to see if in fact they cancel it out (and if so, how). If they don’t, I have a pretty serious problem with what they are publishing, as I’m a pretty firm believer in variation of solar intensity for a nearly constant power output by the sun. Yet we see the annual peak in global average temperature in the northern hemisphere summer when the Earth is farthest from the sun and the minimum in its winter when it is closest to the sun.Insolation per se is not the determining factor in global average temperature! It is much more complex than that.
Given this, why in the world would we expect some immediate, significant, year spanning response even to large volcanic perturbations that are only transiently larger than the annual fluctuation and are not similarly sustained? They are lost in the noise. Not as an assertion, as a simple matter of observational fact. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, can look at the temperature data and guess where volcanoes happened. One can barely look at where volcanoes happened and interpret some variation in the temperature as the response.
rgb

RGB, you noted that:
“we see the annual peak in global average temperature in the northern hemisphere summer when the Earth is farthest from the sun and the minimum in its winter when it is closest to the sun.” despite top of atmosphere insolation varying by 7%, with max at time of NH winter.
Perhaps the Earth warms the most during NH summer because the NH has 68% of the total land area, while the the SH has only 32%. Thus 7% weaker sunlight is falling on approximately twice the land area during peak of NH summer compared to peak of NH winter when 7% stronger sunlight is falling on approximately half the land area. The change in land area exposed to the sun is far greater than the change in strength of sunlight due to the change in Earth-Sun distance.
Since land is warmed by sunlight (temperature rises) more readily than ocean, the peak warming would be during the time of year when the most land is receiving sunlight.
SR

RGB ” Nobody, and I do mean nobody, can look at the temperature data and guess where volcanoes happened.”
You’ll stand a better chance of finding them by looking at temperature deviations before the events.

Offhand I would observe that the aerosol rich eruptions of Agung 1963, El Chichón 1982 and Pinatubo 1991 caused clearly visible warming of the upper atmosphere due to the particles heating up in the sun.http://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/Stratospherictemp_1958-2012_radiosondes.png
So where is the stratospheric warming now from those aerosols? Instead it appears that the stratospheric temperatures are having the same pause as the surface records.

OK – can someone remind me about the claim that efforts to reduce pollution in the 60’s and 70’s were successful and changed the radiation balance? So SO2 from volcanoes caused the pause. What about the SO2 we used to throw into the atmosphere. Did humans cause some warming by cleaning up our emissions? If not A then not B?

Certainly it could be possible possible that scientists have miscalculated the impact of volcanoes on global temperatures. But if using that to even partially explain the pause wouldn’t you have to also make a claim that there has been an increase in eruptive output since some time before the pause started? Have they made that claim? Without that then the miscalculation cannot explain the pause, although if they’re correct then it’s another source of error in the models.
Oh I get it, when they crank up aerosols the models don’t run as hot. The modeling community can say my bad and use this to justify changing their aerosol numbers to to generate numbers closer to what’s actually happened and then claiming the models are much improved while still making sure the algorithms show dangerous warming in the longer term future.

@Non Nomen…When will we shut off these volcanoes???
I propose that we should institute Carbon Trading to suppress them. Basically, if you are a country with a volcano in it and it erupts, you should pay $1 per estimated tonne of CO2 released to the Volcanic Emissions Climate Foundation. Just let me set it up…

This is one of many cases where new measurement technologies have been used, and the papers assume that the effect they are claiming only began when they could measure it. As noted above, there doesn’t seem to be a trend in volcanic activity, just new measurements.

The negative forcing they are quoting is tiny, not much different from TSI that has been derided as too small to account for climate change. If their conjecture is right then the divergence currently occurring between observation and models couldn’t possibly grow any larger.
But if the divergence continues to increase . ..

Hi Vince, the number they use for blocked TSI is .05 too .120 C are they trying to steal the TSI change from there being a lower solar cycle? Off the top of my head the numbers look disconcerting. Also the time frame. The pause has only been openly admitted to for two or so years, has there been time to think up a study, submit grants obtain equipment take measurements etc. Or did they just grab existing sat data and wing it.
Sorry something seems off with all this.
Michael

First the Alarmists tell us that volcanic eruptions cause global warming because of the CO2 they emit–now they are telling us that volcanic eruptions cause global cooling! These are the same people that claim the global cooling of 1945-1977 (when CO2 emissions were soaring) was caused by burning higher-sulfur coal (which somehow must have mysteriously ended abruptly in 1978 despite the fact that much more coal is being burned now than in the 1960’s and 70’s).
Volcanic eruptions have been going on for many hundreds of millions of years. To blame recent cooling on eruptions, you would need to prove abrupt changes in eruptive activity (that’s how climate changes have typically occurred throughout geologic history) and explain why climate shows no correlation with volcanic eruptions. As Willis and I have both argued, the influence of volcanic eruptions on climate is insignificant. Read Willis’s post of a few days ago about the Icelandic eruption of 1783, which didn’t have any unusual effect on Europe’s climate.

I also conclude that these small volcanic eruptions are having NO cooling effect as evidenced by looking at the stratospheric temperature profile which shows no warming in response to all these small volcanic eruptions.
Look at the chart Leftturnandre sent a few post back.
Nevertheless I would like to know what is the residence time in the atmosphere for all the SO2 BARDARBUNGA volcano in Iceland is putting out? It is putting out vast amounts of SO2 but at very low altitudes.
I think a great indicator of what effect volcanic activity is having on the climate is the Volcanic Aerosol Optical Thickness Chart which shows very low levels since the turn of the century.

“The prediction of global temperature from the [latest] models indicated continuing strong warming post-2000, when in reality the rate of warming has slowed,” said Ridley. That meant to him that a piece of the puzzle was missing
Yeah, but when you correct it for time of observation it fits perfectly.
In other news…b.b.b.b.but Pinatubo!

There have been no more small eruptions since 2000 than were from 1985 to 1999.
Total garbage and lame excuse making.
Also, it’s not a slow down in warming, but in unadjusted data, a cooling since the late 1990s.

‘Hiatus’ from google:- a pause or break in continuity in a sequence or activity.
“there was a brief hiatus in the war with France”
synonyms: pause, break, interval, interruption, suspension, intermission, interlude, gap, lacuna, lull, rest, respite, breathing space, time out
I think youre being harsh Doug – slowing down of a rate could still just about be called Hiatus. And as an admission from a warmist I’ll take that any day. Still splitting hairs really

Volcanoes are not the only source of sulphuric acid aerosols look here http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/A-Bi/Algal-Blooms-in-the-Ocean.html and scroll down to Coccolithophores. Major photosynthetic algal foodstuff – largest component of chalk, responds to increasing temperature and increasing CO2 levels, major contributor to carbon sink. During their experiments did they check on other sources of Sulphuric acid. Were there any significant algal blooms at the time for instance

Obama’s first edict should mandate we stop causing volcanic activity because it is sending the wrong message about the impending climate catastrophe to be covered in a later edict. Since there is strong correlation between fracking, volcanic activity, and the pause (reality is suspended here for the good of the people per Gruber’s first postulate) the first regulation in the first edict will be to halt all fracking. This has the side benefit of distracting everyone’s attention from the Gruber fallout which will serve to keep Obamacare on track.
Since this first edict is also well aligned with the more important goal of destroying the US economy it should sale right through the house and senate. And if it doesn’t, BO has his pen at hand.

I suggest we take all that IPCC-triggered printed crap about CAGW, make a nice pulp out of it with the help of some heat-hiding seawater and fill these reckless killer-volcanoes up to the brim. But afaik volcanoes are more intelligent and certainly longer in existence than mankind, they will soon realize what muck is served and might spit it out again…

“2,000,000,000,000 tons in the last ten thousand years
550,000,000,000 from fossil fuels/land use since 1870”
and the chances of that claim having any degree of accuracy worth a dam is what ?
There is a very big difference between a guess, not matter how intelligent, and a value which is know through good measurement. With proxies you have the former no matter how much people like to pretend you have the latter, hence the need for error margins which are often themselves another guess.

Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
Now that the “warmth is hiding in the deep ocean” explanation has been debunked, climate alarmists are grasping at other straws to something to explain the lack of global warming for the past almost-20 years. Anything other than “a natural cycle.” I’m not saying this reason is impossible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Let’s see now, what does the actual data say:http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/mlo-tran.jpg
Hmmm, I’d say it says “claim refuted”. The actual measurement of top of the troposphere total insolation is almost completely flat across the entire range from 1959 to the present except for clearly visible major volcanic eruptions and a smattering of stuff in the 60’s that is arguably related to nuclear testing. I made this graphic myself with R and the published Mauna Loa data from here:http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/mloapt.html
so it is readily checkable. The thick, straight, black line is at 0.93 and is there just to let the eye see just how little top of troposphere insolation has varied over the last 65 years. It is absolutely true that there are a number of highly puzzling features in this figure. Since 2000, the ML data has an annual beat that appears to be almost perfectly regular. This isn’t unusual, but the fact that the data before then is much noisier and with a much less discernible and sharp seasonal fluctuation is extremely odd. Volcanic eruptions are extremely visible as an interruption in top of troposphere insolation relative to the nearly constant baseline — a sudden, sharp drop and smooth non-exponential recovery over 2 to 5 years.http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:2000/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:2000/trend
Note well: Over the period of the most rapid warming visible in the entire 20th century from 1985 to 1998, Pinatubo happened, followed by the 1998 super-ENSO with its nearly opposite effect. El Chichon happened in 1982, ejected massive amounts of Sulphur Dioxide into the atmosphere (7 million metric tons!) and had no visible effect on global climate in the 1980s! Mount St. Helens doesn’t even show up on the Mauna Loa data — it simply wasn’t big enough to register! Only Pinatubo appears to have had an effect, and its supposed effect is of the exact order of magnitude as the natural variation of the system so that one cannot even be certain that it actually cooled the climate. If it did, why didn’t El Chichon?
I would say that this simple graph categorically refutes the hypothesis that occult vulcanism is somehow responsible for “the pause”. The causal chain is “lots of small or undersea volcanoes are emitting enough “stuff” that they are affecting insolation and hence causing cooling”. Mauna Loa data shows no statistically significant change in top of troposphere broadband insolation where it is is demonstrably sensitive to volcanic aerosols and indeed, the reduction in insolation in the mid-60’s could indeed be due to a collection of six smaller eruptions in five years (although a similar stretch in the mid-70’s produced no such dip).
To conclude. The actual measured top of troposphere global insolation shows no variation of the sort hypothesized to be responsible for the apparent cessation of global warming post-2000 over precisely the times from 2000 to the present. It has been almost perfectly flat. It is rare to see a hypothesis that is actually even more unlikely than the current crop of hypotheses that connect warming and cooling to cosmic ray modulation of cloud formation and hence albedo, but this one beats it hands down as it proposes a hypothesis that actually contradicts the data. Second, the actual data shows that even actual variation of top of the troposphere insolation by amounts as large as 10% peak to over 1% sustained for as long as five years produces almost no visible modulation of the temperature trend of the time discernible from unpredictable natural variation. Imagined variation that is surely of order no greater than 0.1% is supposed to be cancelling out 0.2 to 0.5 C of warming that “should” have occurred during this interval (depending on whether you take your feedback amplification from the slightly or completely insane end of things)?
I don’t think so.
And you don’t even want to think about fitting a “linear trend” to the post 2000 top of troposphere insolation data. I can tell you right now that is going to be so miserably low as to make you slink from the room with your tail between your legs, even allowing for one or two “discernible” volcanic events in that range, most notably a double-whammy in 2010.
This does not rule out aerosol modulation of lower troposphere cloud cover, but then one really does have to face up to the fact that GCR’s are a competing, and indeed possibly heterodyning, hypothesis and you still have to explain the lack of effect to volcanic eruptions that are a full order of magnitude or two more powerful back in the 1980’s when global warming was actually following the script that Hansen was attempting to write…
rgb

I put this down as another one of the fifty-plus papers looking for the lost heat that causes hiatus. Since experimental observations are involved the first question is whether such observations exist for small volcanoes that are not conveniently located to be related to the hiatus? Just how many such small volcanoes are known and what data do we have on their emissions? In setting up the background they also use some questionable assumptions about volcanic cooling in general. What I object to also is this uninformed opinion: “The warmest year on record is 1998. After that, the steep climb in global temperature observed over the twentieth century appeared to level off.” 1998 was the warmest all right because it was a super El Nino. It is not to be connected with any other warming and happens only once a century. That “steep climb over the twentieth century does not exist, however. There was a standstill in warming from 1979 to 1997 that is hidden in all ground-based temperature curves by increasing the slope of the temperature curve in the eighties and nineties. I pointed that out in my book “What Warming?” in 2010 but nothing happened.They brazenly kept it up and extended this fake slope to the twenty-first century with the absurd result that now their 2010 El Nino peak is higher than the 1998 super El Nino was. As to the rest of twentieth century, it started out with an early century natural warming that came to an abrupt halt in 1940 when the World War II cold wave hit. There was a precipitous drop of temperature followed by a slow recovery that took 35 years. As a result, global temperature did not return to the 1940 level again until 1980, at which point a warming hiatus set in. It lasted until the super El Nino arrived which was a game changer. This was followed by a short step warming that raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius above the 1990 level in only three years and then stopped. It was followed by another hiatus – ours. The only temperature curve you can trust after 1979 is satellite temperatures from UAH and RSS. They differ slightly and I prefer UAH because I keep getting cooling from RSS. Now back to volcanic cooling. I hate to tell you that but it does not exist for any volcanoes in historic time. What are pointed out as volcanic cooling pockets are nothing more exotic than misidentified La Nina valleys. All temperature curves carry the stamp of the ENSO oscillation in the form of alternating El Nino peaks with La Nina valleys in between. This specifically applies to Pinatubo that they call “cataclysmic.” Its eruption coincided with an El Nino peak and the La Nina valley that followed was taken over as its volcanic cooling period and is so marked on temperature charts. But you can’t do that with El Chichon and they are all scratching their heads. The explanation is that its eruption coincided with a La Nina valley. Now answer this. If a cataclysmic eruption did not noticeably change the climate, why should we believe that small eruptions can do that?[If you are commenting from Facebook-type editor, or from a cell phone/handset device that “sends” when the carriage return is entered, consider using “Shift + Enter” to establish internal paragraph markings in your replies. They are (usually) technically challenging and interesting, but are very, very difficult to read as-sent. .mod]

Arno, you make a number of assertions here, and I’m not unwilling to believe them, but not without a very direct and quantitative and reproducible basis outside of the assertions themselves. You are basically accusing Hadley, GISS, etc of overt fraud, and you are asserting that the correct global temperature/anomaly is completely different. One has the feeling that there is a temperature series out there, let’s call it ArnoT, that starts from the same set of publicly available data that all of these series have to start from and that gets it right.
For example, you assert that there was no warming in the 80s and 90’s up to the ENSO event, and that they are somehow successfully biasing even modern post 2000 temperatures so that they show a warming trend (except, of course, that they DON’T show a warming trend). I’m having a hard time reconciling all of these assertions with one another and things like HadCRUT4 or GISSTEMP. Groups like Berkeley that have put together their own global temperature estimate to compare to these two — are you asserting that they are all in cahoots? Because I think Steve Mosher would disagree — they from all reports tried to do their — cough cough — BEST, and if anything the person that spearheaded the project was and remains a lukewarmist.
I’m sympathetic, as I said, to your assertion that they make an error because there are things about the patterns of global weather that don’t match up well with the narrative of their temperatures, and because e.g. HadCRUT4 doesn’t correct for UHI at all and GISS corrects for it (from what I’ve read) backwards, so that it somehow increases the apparent warming on average instead of strictly decreasing it. I want to believe you. But I mistrust my own biases and beliefs. So:Evidence, please.
In particular, what raw data are you basing your statement on? How do you process it? Where is your ArnoT dataset (and the code used to convert the raw data into ArnoT)? You have to solve the same problem that Hadley, GISS, Berkeley, etc have to solve — take a huge, disparate set of station measurements of temperature from over a century and a half and distill them into global temperatures and a global temperature anomaly. I’m skeptical that anybody can do this at the precision claimed simply because we lack adequate sampling of maybe 80% of the Earth’s surface for most of that time — most of the oceans, all of Antarctica, most of Australia, much of central Asia, much of the polar arctic, much of South America. Indeed, the only places we do sample pretty well are major urban civilized enclaves — Europe, the eastern part of North America, the coastal regions of South America and Australia, and selected parts of the colonial empires, e.g. India and parts of Africa, plus the shipping lanes connecting them (which are sampled irregularly and with terrible methodology, but are not completely unknown as is most of the ocean for most of that time).Ignorance of global temperatures before 1900 I can easily believe, adequate knowledge of global temperatures from 1900 through 1950 I can totally believe, but in the post WWII world with jet aircraft and then satellites and with even forgotten parts of the Pacific and Antarctica suddenly possessing strategic value, from 1950 to 1970 our knowledge rapidly increased, and from the 1970s/1980s to the present, we really did start to get a decent picture of global temperature and other things. You’re saying that the major temperature anomalies of the 1980s and 1990’s in particular are a fraud?
Evidence, please. Ideally specific lines in the GISS source (which is published, by law) that make errors, or specific data processing steps that you disagree with in the equally published GISS data. Hadley may have a hard time providing the basis for their past estimates after Jones supposedly lost some of the data, but I’m pretty sure GISS,
BEST, and so on can and do provide all of theirs.
rgb

What? No small eruptions during the 80’s and 90’s? Pinatubo made a 2 year glitch but didn’t have as big a long term impact?
Quite the range .05 to .12, still not enough to counter the models.
Is spraying some sulfur dioxide in the upper atmousphere all it takes to counter global warming?
Problem solved.

So an alarmist supporter now concedes that there actually is a hiatus, and not that “the
heat” has magically “gone to the bottom of the oceans”. In this case all the talk about global changes being due to “warming” or “climate change” are therefore gibberish, as we already knew anyway.
One of the comments mentions spraying sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere therefore as a consequential solution to actual global warming. A great deal of chemical atmospheric spraying has already been recently done, for reasons seemingly not made clear, but one suggestion was to lessen GW. If there is any substance to this theory, it could be claimed that that is the reason for the “hiatus”, yet that claim has not arisen, to my knowledge. Any thoughts on this?

Mods: Chemtrails are paranoid poop.
Why would anyone use such an indiscriminating means of chemical mind-control.. even if it was real?
This embarrasses the whole site. And as a regular here, I object.[We usually kill those references when we see them. If one got by, locate it -> mark for deletion. .mod]

I understood volcanoes played a crucial part in the scheme of things, returning life-giving CO2 into the atmosphere, derived from the remains of age-old crustaceans on the sea bed, these having been conveyed underground by the movement of tectonic plates. And isn’t it this CO2, abruptly discharged by volcanoes erupting after millennia of being bottled-up during ice-ages, that causes enough global warming to bring the world out of an ice-age? Now we are invited to forget all that so as to make observations fit the AGW conjecture. Volcanoes making the world cooler? Yeah, right.

I just learned that there actually is no pause….2014 was the hottest ever in every respect! So sayeth NBC.
Quote:
“Even if it’s freezing in your personal universe, Earth as a whole just broke three “warmest” records and is likely to see 2014 go down as the warmest since record keeping began in 1880, scientists reported Thursday.”
So it is the “warmest ever” even if it is freezing. Funny enough, this year, everybody seems to have been freezing. In continental Europe it was necessary to switch on the heater several times this August – a first. But that was just in our personal European universe of course.http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/2014-boils-toward-warmest-year-ever-three-more-records-broken-n252776

“BOILS toward warmest year ever!?” That’s what happens when I put the teakettle on the stove. Maybe the climate pundits should move their thermometers outside. And away from the dryer vent, please.
Oh, wait. I get it. It’s cold here in MY personal universe, but in whatever alternate universe these aliens come from things are really heating up…
Incidentally, whenever I check the local weather report online I look at the historic high for this area (Mendocino County, California). About 90% of the time it is in the first half of the 20th century and most often in the first three decades. Today’s record is 80 deg F in 1932. The high for today is 50 with much needed rain.

Well if that is their claim, then all the human generated CO2 added cannot be said to be either good or bad. All that extra CO2 may save the human race if in 30-50 years there is a major volcanic eruption. The CO2 induced warming will be the only thing stopping another mini ice age.
So unless they can accurately predict volcanic eruptions of the next 100 years, global warming can be good.

But according to David Ridley, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and lead author of the new study, classic climate models weren’t adding up.
They weren’t? That’s not what the warmists have been saying!

IMHO, I think geothermal/volcanic might be a more significant source of heat, maybe even the “missing” hiatus heat.
IPCC AR5 TS.6 admits they have low certainty about the oceans below 2,000 m, which is 50% of it. I believe there is a lot of geothermal heat flux through the thin crust that comprises the ocean floor. The Antarctic ice sheet that floated away a year ago was found to have volcanic hot spots under it. Glaciers melt from the warm earth not the cold air. And I recall a recent article where a long string of volcanic vents were discovered along ocean floor plate ridges.
It’s those unknown unknowns that just keep popping up.
The AGW/CCC argument is basically warming equals CO2 because what else could cause it? Well, just look around. Not that all difficult to find other natural possibilities.http://www.writerbeat.com/articles/3713-CO2-Feedback-Loop

Several decades ago, early sixties, my cousins and I were stacking hay bales at my grandfather’s farm outside Las Animas, CO. As it was a hot summer’s day we had brought along one of those canvas covered water bags. For those who haven’t seen one, there’s a picture on one of Jackson Browne’s albums. Before you filled the bag you had to saturate the canvas with water. The water would evaporate and cool the contents, water, wine, beer. The evaporating water would approach the wet bulb temperature determined by the ambient humidity, maybe 10 or 15 F below the ambient dry bulb. (90 F, 30% – 67 F WBT) One of my cousins dropped the bag from several rows up. Don’t do that. Split that bag wide open. No forgiveness in incompressible water.
I think this is what Miatello means by a refrigerator rather than a blanket or greenhouse. The water cycle cools the earth. In a refrigeration cycle the ammonia or Freon is compressed and when it expands its temperature drops. The water cycle absorbs energy and cools when it releases it through evaporation w/o a sensible temperature increase.
My only objection to Miatello’s paper is his suggestion that entropy has something to do with randomness. Not so. Entropy is about heat & energy. Order/disorder, random/not random have exactly zero to do with it.
Entropy says that a closed system will degrade from a higher energy level to lower energy level. If I brought order into it I would say from a high energy/highly disordered state to a low energy/less disordered state. Pretty much the opposite of the creation science interpretation. Greater order and lower energy are entropy’s natural flow.http://principia-scientific.org/publications/PSI_Miatello_Refutation_GHE.pdf
Terribly “unsettling” paper from 2012, yet.

The solar “constant” (mean value) isn’t known to better than +/- 0.48 W-m^-2, so the calculated reduction of 0.19 W-m^-2 can never be proven by measurement. Furthermore, the amount of solar energy getting into the earth system itself varies by +/-47 W/m^-2 over the course of a year as the earth goes from perihelion to aphelion and back, and by as +/-34 W-m^-2 randomly and rapidly, as cloud cover changes the albedo. It’s pure snake oil sales to pretend to be able to pick out a tiny signal of any kind in that much noise, especially when the purported signal is smaller than the uncertainty in the mean value.

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